obsidian-to-pandoc

Converts Obsidian wiki-links to pandoc-compatible markdown links so that internal heading references work in pandoc-generated PDFs and HTML.

Overview

Obsidian uses a wiki-link syntax ([[#Heading]]) for internal heading links that pandoc does not recognize. This tool pre-processes an Obsidian markdown file, converting wiki-links to standard markdown anchor links ([Heading](#heading)) using pandoc’s heading ID slugification algorithm.

Usage

Pipe directly into pandoc

python3 obsidian_to_pandoc.py input.md | pandoc -o output.pdf

Write converted output to a file

python3 obsidian_to_pandoc.py input.md -o converted.md

Read from stdin

cat input.md | python3 obsidian_to_pandoc.py

What it converts

Obsidian syntax	Converted output
[[#Heading Text\|display text]]	[display text](#heading-text)
[[#Heading Text]]	[Heading Text](#heading-text)

Example

Before:

See [[#Configuration Options|the config section]] for details.

Refer to [[#Getting Started]] for setup instructions.

After:

See [the config section](#configuration-options) for details.

Refer to [Getting Started](#getting-started) for setup instructions.

Slugification algorithm

The heading-to-anchor conversion follows pandoc’s heading ID algorithm (documented in the pandoc manual under “Heading identifiers”):

1. Remove all non-alphanumeric characters except underscores, hyphens, and periods
2. Replace spaces and newlines with hyphens
3. Convert to lowercase
4. Remove leading non-letter characters

Options

Option	Description
infile	Input markdown file (default: stdin)
-o, --output	Output file (default: stdout)

Source

doc_utils/obsidian_to_pandoc.py